


Healing Grace

by Zetal (Rodinia)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Grace - Freeform, Healing, M/M, Sam Being Sam, Self-harm kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:24:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8336422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rodinia/pseuds/Zetal
Summary: Cas hates seeing Sam hurting, and even more than that, hates Sam's reasoning for not accepting healing.
Note: the self-harm is not actively harming himself, but not seeking appropriate care for harm inflicted by others.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a Tumblr post from @corpuscassie  
> "What if Sam can identify Cas by his grace? He interacted with Gadreel and Lucifer’s grace before so I wonder if whenever Cas heals him or anything, if he automatically knows it’s him."

If there was one thing Cas hated more than anything else, it was seeing Sam with bruises, cuts, lying in a pool of blood, and/or generally banged around. Not that seeing Dean beat up was pleasant, but Dean at least would complain about it. Acknowledge that the injuries actually hurt and it sucked. Sam would just take them. If Cas brought them up, Sam would give a quick smile and dismiss them as “looking so much worse than they are”, or “other people got it worse”, or “I’ve survived worse”. Once, Castiel took advantage of Sam being drunk to talk to him about it, and Sam had admitted that he felt that every bruise, every drop of blood lost, was somehow a just punishment for all the ways Sam had screwed up. Every injury he suffered was one that Dean and Cas didn’t, that innocent people didn’t.

Cas didn’t like that, and he told Sam so. Sam just shrugged. “Of course you don’t. You have this warped image of me as something so much better than I am.”

“Is this why you rarely let me heal you?”

“What? No. That’s… the less you use your grace, the longer it’ll last! I’d much rather deal with pain like I’ve dealt with all my life than be responsible for you shortening yours. It’s… Cas, I swear, I’m not punishing myself by refusing healing. Dean doesn’t let you heal him either, for all he complains about the pain. It’s not worth losing you.” Sam moved from his chair to sit in Cas’s lap, snuggling up awkwardly because of his much larger size. “Nothing’s worth losing you.”

Cas wasn’t sure he quite believed Sam, but he let it go. Sam was stubborn. Too stubborn for Cas to be able to change his mind.

 

The first hunt after Cas got his own, limited, grace back, he responded to a prayer from Sam. There was blood pooled under his leg, which had several large gashes, and Sam looked pale and somewhat shaky. “Cas. Hey. Good to see you.”

“Are you okay?”

Sam looked at his leg. “I’ll live. Hurts like hell, I can’t stand on it. I tried. But I was able to stop the bleeding before I lost too much.”

Castiel nodded and went to help Sam get up. Sam caught his hand. “Can you heal it?”

“Of course I can. Why do you ask?”

Sam grinned, laughing a little as he got an arm up around Cas’s shoulders. “No, I wasn’t… I know you’re capable of healing it. I was asking if you would.”

Castiel drew back to glare at Sam. “That’s even more insulting. But you said you’d live, which has always meant ‘let me suffer’ before.”

Sam laughed out loud at that. “Heal me up, Cas. Please?”

Castiel gingerly touched Sam’s leg, watching as the wound knit itself together. Sam watched, too, smiling the whole time. “What’s changed?”

“Well, for one, it’s your grace. It’s not gonna burn you out when it runs out, so you’re not literally killing yourself to fix me.” Sam reached down to touch the wound. “But it’s more than that. It’s your grace. It just… it feels better.”

Castiel tilted his head quizzically. “I don’t understand. One angel’s grace should feel like any other’s, to a human.”

Sam shrugged. “To a normal human, maybe it would. But I’ve been possessed by two different angels, attacked by so many more… and yours feels different. All I know, maybe it’s the traces of demon blood I’ve got left reacting to the grace, and yours doesn’t set it off anymore. I don’t care. I just care that I can tell your grace from another angel’s, even when you’re the one using the grace, and I like it.”

Castiel hesitated, not sure he wanted to know the answer, but in the end he had to ask. “What about you… deserving it?”

Sam shrugged. “You’ve never agreed with that. I still think I deserve it, but it hurts you to let me be hurt, and you don’t deserve that. Between hurting you and killing you, I could live with hurting you, but now making you suffer because I deserve to just adds to the debt I owe.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments help top off writers' grace!


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